Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. Roy Scranton
at the mercy of a changing climate. Decreased rainfall and diminished snowpack in the mountains mean that the Tigris and Euphrates are drying up, a problem exacerbated by new dams, increased water use, and water diversion in Turkey, Iran, and Syria. Drought, Saddam Hussein’s draining of the Mesopotamian Marshes, and the devastation and abandonment of farmland due to years of war, neglect, and neoliberal economic policies favoring foreign imports over local produce have increased desertification, which in turn is unleashing punishing dust storms on Iraq’s cities and crops.41
There are, of course, many differences between Uruk’s distant collapse and Iraq’s ongoing crisis. One of the most important is that Iraq’s situation is man-made, while Uruk’s was not. Another is that in 2200 BCE, the only things that beleaguered Sumerians could do in response to a changing climate were ration their grain and pray. Today, national, regional, and local governments worldwide, in cooperation with international bodies such as the IPCC, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the World Bank, the International Energy Agency (IEA), and the World Trade Organization (WTO), confront the problem of global warming with tremendous resources, the knowledge of thousands of highly trained scientists and engineers, and the support of hundreds of thousands of dedicated activists and concerned citizens. Yet for all that, we seem no more capable than were the people of Uruk when it comes to rescuing ourselves from imminent catastrophe.
The scientific study of climate change goes back to the early nineteenth century, when geologists and naturalists struggled to make sense of evidence suggesting that much of the Earth had once been covered in glaciers, and the science developed as physicists and chemists sought to understand the composition and mechanics of the Earth’s atmosphere. The Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius demonstrated the close relation between carbon dioxide levels and atmopheric temperature in 1895, theorizing what we now understand as the greenhouse effect and suggesting that widespread coal burning might increase global temperatures.42 By the 1950s and 1960s, the effects of industrial pollution on the global climate were being studied by many scientists, among them Charles David Keeling, whose graph measuring carbon dioxide at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawai‘i, the now-famous “Keeling Curve,” showed clearly that atmospheric CO2 was increasing. Over the next thirty years, evidence for man-made global warming grew, and by the late 1980s a scientific consensus had been established.
In 1988, James Hansen, then director of the National Air and Space Administration’s Insitute for Space Studies, testified before the US Senate that the Earth was definitely warming, and “that it was 99 percent certain that the warming trend was not a natural variation but was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere.”43 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was founded that same year to report and advise the United Nations on the problem of climate change, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was established in 1992, committing its signatories to stabilizing global greenhouse gas emissions at a safe level. Every member nation of the UN signed the UNFCCC treaty in 1992 and most had ratified it by 1995, but the commitments they made came with no clear objectives, no viable mechanism for monitoring whether objectives were achieved, and no binding authority to enforce compliance.
In the decades since, while the almost two hundred nations committed to the UNFCCC have worked out individual emissions targets, they have not come to any agreement on monitoring or enforcement. Conference after conference has sunk under its own weight as a lack of accountability, intransigence from the US, China, and India, outsized goals set with no realistic plan for achieving them, bickering, and global power politics have led to failure after failure. Meanwhile, global greenhouse gas emissions have increased 35 percent since 1990, driven primarily by waste carbon dioxide from expanding energy consumption in North America and Asia.44
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